Book Review: Walking Verdun – A Guide to The Battlefield by Christina Holstein

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Most British visitors to the First World War battlefields of France and Belgium concentrate on the Somme and Ypres, not continuing south to the French sectors of the Western Front. It is therefore good to see a book dedicated to visiting the site of what is probably the most famous extended battle of the French Army during the war: the Battle of Verdun, February to December 1916.

The book consists of a series of ten walks through the hilly and wooded terrain just north of Verdun where the fighting took place. They are arranged in chronological order of the events each one covers (though the to-and-fro nature of the Verdun battle makes it impossible to be strict about this) and each walk begins with a description of the events followed with directions for the walk itself.

Although primarily a guide book for visiting the various sites on foot, the book can also be read cover to cover to give a good introduction to the nine and half months of muddled fighting at Verdun. This is due to the clear writing and the chronological arrangement of the walks, and indeed I got a better understanding of the battle from reading this guide than I did from other books supposedly written as an introduction to the battle.

The book is liberally illustrated with black and white photographs, a well-chosen mix of contemporary shots and modern ones from Ms Holstein’s own collection. There are no colour plates, but that in no way detracts from the book.

How well does it function as a guide book when actually following the walks? Well I have yet to try it (I will be visiting the battlefield this summer) but the descriptions of the routes are clear and look sufficient to be able to follow the planned routes. The author uses the numbers that are signposted on each block of the post-war regular woodland with which the battlefield was planted after 1918. There is a single map for each walk, but it is a sketch map with few features shown other than those relevant to the walk and it would not be sufficient to find the correct path again should one make an error and deviate from the route. I would certainly not try these walks, some of which are in quite remote parts of the woods away from the sites visited by the majority of battlefield tourists, without a good map such as the French IGN 1:25000 map of the area (IGN Carte Topographique 3112ET). Also, for such a recent book (published 2009) the lack of GPS co-ordinates for the technologically-equipped walker seems strange, though I would warn walkers that GPS units are notoriously unreliable within woodland where the view of the sky is obscured and so this lack is maybe not as serious as it seems.